In the European and North American tradition, a thing is natural insofar as its existence does not depend on human intervention, while something is artificial if its existence depends on human activity. From this perspective, artificiality extends not just to some physical objects but also to intellectual phenomena such as science, art, and technology—to the extent that they are characteristic of human life. With regard to strictly physical artifice, Aristotle, in Physics, further notes that unlike natural objects, artifacts do not have internal sources of motion and rest. If a bed were to sprout, what would come up would not be another bed, but an oak tree (Book 2.1). In relation to both these extrinsic and intrinsic features, it has also been common to assess artifice, in comparison with nature, as a diminished level of reality, and sometimes as less valuable. The ethics of artifacts has usually been...